Connie realized, as she covered the short distance to the house, that something very serious had just happened between her and Devan. She was pretty certain there was no cooing female voice online, consoling her husband in his outrage at her intransigence and neglect. This was worse, in a way. A significant breach had opened up in their relationship today. As if a door, long fastened and secure, were being slowly forced ajar. Devan, she saw, was using the threat to their relationship as blackmail. Forcing her to quit the tours. But she knew that if she gave in now, she would resent him for the rest of her life.

8

As Connie sat on the Eurostar, staring out of the window at the flat grey-green stretches of Normandy flashing past, she realized that each tour seemed to mark out a further decline in her relationship with Devan.

The tulip tour had seen the connection between them stuttering, as if they were coming in and out of signal, her husband’s increasing lack of motivation and attention to his personal care – including drinking too much – becoming more apparent. Lake Como had witnessed a ratcheting up of his sniping about her retirement, his ongoing avoidance of any physical contact and his obsessive withdrawal behind his phone screen. And now Lake Garda seemed to have identified a new low, where the very bedrock of their marriage was being questioned.

Since the conversation in the pub, Connie felt they had been shocked into a temporary moratorium on any further discussions about their relationship. They’d tiptoed around each other in the days before she left, as if each were an invalid who couldn’t cope with stress. She didn’t dare explore what Devan had meant. He clearly didn’t dare either. And, as had become the norm these days, Connie had not taken a proper breath until she was on the train to London and away from her husband’s discontented presence. She wondered gloomily how bad it would have become by the time she was on her way to Poland next month.

‘Ah, Connie! Bentornata, cara.’ Bianca Conti, diminutive but fizzing with energy – although she was well into her seventies – kissed her warmly on both cheeks. ‘Avanti! Ciao, ciao, benvenuti a tutti.’ She opened her arms to the group in the foyer with a charming smile.

Connie had been bringing tours to this family-run hotel in Desenzano for a decade now. It was Venetian in style, faded terracotta with narrow arched windows and lacy balconies overlooking the peaceful harbour for small boats on the shores of Lake Garda. Bianca ran the hotel with her two sons, Federico and Sandro, but was unquestionably in control.